Abstract
Amy Tan is a prominent Chinese American writer in the contemporary American literary world and has drawn considerable attention from mainstream critics at home and abroad. After its publication in 1989,her first novel The Joy Luck Club Stayed on the New York times bestseller list for nine months and won her several prestigious awards including the National Book Award for Fiction and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.Thus the novel enjoys high compliments and great popularity not only from the critics but among common readers.
In the novel The Joy Luck Club,Silence and silence-breaking is one of the most important themes.It is of great use for us to comprehend the implications of silence and silence-breaking,which can help us to better probe the profound connotations of the novel and the writing intention of the writer. So the present thesis attempts to make a post-colonialist and femisist study of The Joy Luck Club with a focus on the theme of silence and silence-breaking.
This paper discusses The Joy Luck Club in the theme of breaking the silence. Between mothers and daughters, mothers break the silence by telling their own stories to eliminate the generation gap between them. Suyuan sets up The Joy Luck Club. An-mei’s mother commits suicide in order to give her daughter a better life. Ying-ying has to abort her son and Lindo makes use of superstition to escape a horrible marriage. With the help of mothers, the daughters learn to shout in their marriage. Finally, the daughters break the silence and construct the famale subjectivity in their marriage.
Keywords The Joy Luck Club; break the silence; feminism; female subjectivity
Contents
Abstract I
Contents I
Introduction 1
1.Literature review 3
1.1 Relevant research on feminism……………………………………………..3
1.2 Research on The Joy Luck Club…………………………………………….3
2.Breaking the silence in The Joy Luck Club from feminist perspective 4
2.1 The causes of silence in The Joy Luck Club…………………………………4
2.1.1 Different cultures 4
2.1.2 Different ways of expression 5
2.2 The Performance of silence………………………………………………….6
2.2.1 The daughters’ silence 7
2.2.2 The mothers’ silence 7
2.3 The expression of feminism………………………………………………….9
2.3.1 Breaking the silence-storytelling 9
2.3.2 Learning to shout 10
2.4 The result of feminism consciousness 11
2.4.1 Elimination of the generation gap………………………………………………11
2.4.2 The construction of female subjective 12
3 .Conclusion 13
References 14
